well-groomed, smartly tailored, and conventionally attractive appearance
complements a veneer of moral propriety – the absence of either signifies
doom. Hurstwood presents the prototypical pattern. After his flight to New
York, his clothes grow shabbier while Carrie’s need for nice ones grows
stronger. The episode that both exemplifies and accelerates his fall occurs
when the snobbish Mrs. Vance calls on Carrie unannounced and discov-
ers the unkempt, unshaven Hurstwood, sitting home in his rocking chair
mulling over the newspaper. Mrs. Vance “could scarcely believe her eyes,”
and even the listless Hurstwood feels “intense relief at her going. He was so
ashamed that he folded his hands weakly, as he sat in the chair afterwards
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Dreiser and the history of American longing
and thought.” In the end his deteriorating looks reveal less about his
character (the Victorian moral perspective) than about his fate. The night
Carrie decides to leave him, “she looked at him . . . and now he seemed not
so much shiftless and worthless, but run-down and beaten upon by chance.
His eyes were not keen, his face marked, his hands flabby. She thought his
hair had a touch of gray” ( Sister Carrie, 371, 435). Signs of physical decline make it clear that Hurstwood is finished.
To succeed, one needed to combine clothes and looks with what Dreiser
called “personality,” by which he meant a certain native brightness combined
with a self-assured drive for success – or at least the semblance of those qualities. Artifice and authenticity, outward perfection and inner vitality, cohered in the superior man or woman. Dreiser merged the theatrical emphasis on
manipulating appearances with the anti-theatrical emphasis on cultivating
depths – two tendencies that had long coexisted uneasily in market society,
especially in Protestant America.12 He revered characters who could orches-
trate outward impressions while remaining true to some inner core of being –
people whose longings could energize a convincing social performance.
The Nietzschean superman Cowperwood epitomizes this successful syn-
thesis. When he goes to prison, his keepers are awed by his presence. This
is a man to take seriously. Even when he puts on the cloddish prison uni-
form, he remains “a man whose face and form blazed energy and power,
and whose vigorous erectness no wretched clothes or conditions could de-
mean” ( Financier, 398). Eugene Witla is less awesome but still resistant to the demeaning power of circumstance. Seeking recovery from a protracted
bout of neurasthenia, he hires on as a day laborer with the railroad. “Day
laborer! How fine, how original, how interesting,” he thinks. Still, “he did
not look like a working man and could not be made to do so. His spirit was
too high, his eye too flashing and incisive” ( “Genius” , 312). He is an artist, but of the particularly shrewd and energetic sort who could flourish in an
advertising agency, mass-marketing surface-effects for corporate clients.
In An American Tragedy, Dreiser reveals the power of appearances at its most pervasive. Young Clyde’s flight from his family stems initially from his
anxiety about how he looks. To Clyde (and Dreiser), appearances reveal the
chasm between the two Griffiths brothers: the successful Samuel is not only
“good-lookin’” (as Clyde’s fellow bellhop Ratterer says) but “so very quick,
alert, incisive – so very different from his father” who was “short, fat, and
poorly knit mentally as well as physically – oleaginous and a bit murky, as it
were” ( American Tragedy, 173–174). By assuming that people could be categorized according to the details of their appearance, Dreiser preserved the
taxonomic tendency of nineteenth-century thought. In his work, as in phre-
nology and scientific racism, physiognomy and physique appear to be destiny.
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Fortunately Clyde does not resemble his father. Indeed Clyde’s good looks
become crucial to his social ascent. From their first meeting, his handsome
face and manner – and particularly his resemblance to Samuel’s son Gilbert –
incline the rich uncle to “want to do something for the boy.” Samuel describes
Clyde as “good looking” when he reveals his discovery to his family; Gilbert
is suspicious, his sister Bella intrigued. “I hope he’s better looking than the rest of our cousins,” she says. After interviewing Clyde on his arrival at
the collar factory, Gilbert submits a series of withering observations to the
women of the family: “He’s fairly intelligent and not bad looking . . . He
thinks clothes are the whole thing, I guess. He had on a light brown suit
and a brown tie and a hat to match and brown shoes. His tie was too bright
and he had on one of those bright pink shirts like they used to wear three or
four years ago. Besides his clothes aren’t cut right” ( American Tragedy, 159, 194–195).
Mrs. Griffiths, hearing about the young man’s taste, worries about his
judgment: as a Griffiths in Lycurgus, he will need to appear correct at all
times. With observations like this, Dreiser shrewdly caught the respectable
classes’ sense that they were under siege. He knew that Mrs. Griffiths’ un-
bending standards of propriety stemmed from her suspicion that she was
surrounded by pervasive impropriety – the demimonde of coarse excess that
he recreates in cheap lakeside resorts and nouveau-riche hotels. If Clyde’s
clothes “aren’t cut right,” he might well be more at home in that world.
Sorting people by status was a slippery and elusive task in a society that
combined mobility and inequality, where class credentials could be faked.
One couldn’t be too careful.
But when Clyde appears for Sunday supper, Samuel finds the boy to be
“very satisfactory in appearance” and “even more attractive than before . . .”
( American Tragedy, 221). He is shocked a few days later when he visits the shrinking room and discovers Clyde sweating away in his undershirt and
trousers. Get him out of there, he tells Gilbert, that’s no way for a Griffiths to look.
Gilbert’s suspicion of Clyde stems in part from their close physical re-
semblance – which also fortuitously initiates Clyde’s affair with Sondra
and his entry into the local elite. When a plain-speaking debutante named
Gertrude Trumbull refers to his good looks, Clyde is thrilled. “ ‘Oh, am I
good-looking?’ he beamed nervously, amused and yet pleased. ‘Who said
so?’ ” Gertrude dodges the question, then presses the point: “ ‘don’t you
think you’re better-looking than your cousin [Gilbert]?’ ” Clyde denies it;
Gertrude says he is, but it won’t help him much without money. “ ‘People
like money even more than they do looks.’ ” Clyde will have to get by on
looks alone, and in the end the power of personal attractiveness is insufficient 76
Dreiser and the history of American longing
to overcome the apparent evidence of a capital crime. Once he is accused
of murder, he becomes invisible to his social superiors – and all too visible
to the population of Cataraqui County, for whom he is just another society
swell preying on a poor working girl. Class resentments combine with more
personal motives in the character of Orville Mason, the district attorney. His
“otherwise even pleasant face is marred by a broken nose,” which makes him
repugnant to women and bitter toward those who can attract them. Yet for
all the self-righteousness of Clyde’s prosecutors, it is difficult to sympathize with his plight. He learns nothing – even his death-house statement that he
has “found Jesus Christ” is a formulaic screed, coaxed, coached, and partly
ghostwritten by the minister who has been visiting him ( American Tragedy, 331, 526, 804). Clyde is as full of self-pity and status anxiety at the end as
at the beginning.
Other characters in Dreiser – especially female characters – sometimes do
learn a little something, even enough to wonder whether the cosmic struggle
for survival makes any moral sense. This moment of wonder seems most
likely to occur, in Dreiser, to women or less powerful men – Jennie Gerhardt’s
father at the end of his life, Jennie after the death of her child, Carrie at the height of her fame. Even as she escapes poverty and anonymity, she sits in
her rocking chair and wonders whether life is ruled by anything beyond mere
chance.
A friend of Mrs. Vance, Robert Ames, speaks directly to Carrie’s dis-
ease. Unlike anyone else in the novel, Ames is a man who actually makes
things, not a mere manipulator of appearances. A representative of the tech-
nical branch of the emerging professional-managerial class, he is an engineer
who has invented a successful street light – which is now illuminating cities
throughout the land, attracting young moths like Carrie. Yet Ames himself
regards the glittering pleasures of the city with distrust, less out of moralistic disapproval than a sense of the self-defeating qualities of desire. “I have found out that everyone is more or less dissatisfied. No one has exactly what
his heart wishes,” he tells Carrie. “‘If you have powers, cultivate them. The